Publications
Improvements to address issues leading to cancellation of the July 2014 Plutonium shot
Overview: A Pu shot scheduled for July 17 on the Z machine at SNL was cancelled this past summer. The LiF windows on the Pu targets were cracked during assembly because of configuration changes. Sandia management concluded that continuing with this experiment would present an unacceptable level of risk to the facility and possibly to the workers. In this report, we document the events that occurred which led to this decision and also present some lessons learned and plans and procedures put in place to reduce the likelihood of another such occurrence. The changes and this memorandum reflect the thinking of subject matter experts at both LANL and SNL. These changes represent significant improvements in both communication protocols and quality of the hardware assemblies.